This invention relates to DNA polymerases suitable for DNA sequencing.
DNA sequencing involves the generation of four populations of single-stranded DNA fragments, having one defined terminus and one variable terminus. The variable terminus always terminates at a specific given nucleotide base (either guanine (G), adenine (A), thymine (T), or cytosine (C)). The four different sets of fragments are each separated on the basis of their length, on a high resolution polyacrylamide gel; each band on the gel corresponds colinearly to a specific nucleotide in the DNA sequence, thus identifying the positions in the sequence of the given nucleotide base.
Generally there are two methods of DNA sequencing. One method (Maxam and Gilber sequencing) involves the chemical degradation of isolated DNA fragments, each labeled with a single radiolabel at its defined terminus, each reaction yielding a limited cleavage specifically at one or more of the four bases (G, A, T or C). The other method (dideoxy sequencing) involves the enzymatic synthesis of a DNA strand. Four separate syntheses are run, each reaction being caused to terminate at a specific base (G, A, T or C) via incorporation of the appropriate chain terminating dideoxynucleotide. The latter method is preferred since the DNA fragments are uniformly labelled (instead of end labelled) and thus the larger DNA fragments contain increasingly more radioactivity. Further, .sup.35 S-labelled nucleotides can be used in place of .sup.32 P-labelled nucleotides, resulting in sharper definition; and the reaction products are simple to interpret since each lane corresponds only to either G, A, T or C. The enzymes used for most dideoxy sequencing are the Escherichia coli DNA-polymerase I large fragment ("Klenow"), AMV reverse transcriptase, and T7 DNA polymerase (Tabor et al., U.S. Pat. No. 4,795,699). The T7 DNA polymerase used for sequencing is said to be advantageous over other DNA polymerases because it is processive, has no associated exonuclease activity, does not discriminate against nucleotide analog incorporation, and can utilize small oligonucleotides as primers. These properties are said to make the polymerase ideal for DNA sequencing. Id.